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Mar Hicks
@histoftech
Historian of technology & labor. Professor now, sysadmin before. Tells dad jokes (sorry). TQ, they/them.
Chicago, ILlinktr.ee/marhicksJoined October 2011

Mar Hicks’s Tweets

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Happy Groundhog Day! Welcome to the third year running where I tell dad jokes to try to keep us all from crying. twitter.com/histoftech/sta…
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how normal for a democracy
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And there’s more coming, including a plan to give authority over faculty hires to the president instead of those faculty search committees where the process is “hidden” tampabay.com/news/education
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Faculty, staff, and student email accounts at UF are being searched with almost NO explanation or show of support from above; many finding out after the fact. People are understandably scared, especially untenured or soft-money folks.
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I was notified recently my email will be searched because of my service on a DEI committee. This is higher education in Florida twitter.com/nicolegravina/…
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Currently reading ’s latest🔥🔥🔥 Using it in my graduate seminar on data and power.
Democracy’s Data, book cover — by Dan Bouk
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I’m gonna talk about something that I’m not supposed to talk about. I’m a 37 year old with dentures. I was dirt poor for most of my adult life, and worked jobs that didn’t offer dental care (hospitality/serving). Small problems like cavities became BIG problems.
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It’s almost as if… there’s a reason other than economics… for companies’ displays of raw power over workers…
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Except Google didn't need to lay off anyone - they made *$13.9bn in net profit last quarter.* They are FLUSH with cash. They are acting as if economic conditions just changed - except the obvious signs have been there if you bothered to look. They lied! ez.substack.com/p/google-shoul
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I guess we’ve all forgotten the lessons of Reconstruction and have decided that there will be minimal social ostracism incurred for plotting an anti-democratic usurpation of power and violent insurrection. A terrible mistake.
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🚨🚨🚨 #BREAKING : @Meta to reinstate @realdonaldtrump Facebook and Instagram accounts "in coming weeks" following a 2yr ban, @NickClegg, the company's president of global affairs, told me and @mikeallen in an interview Read on @axios: axios.com/2023/01/25/tru
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This is amazing.
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Replying to @histoftech
I accidentally discovered this while looking at a photo of a roast my spouse had put in the slow-cooker & it unnerved me so much I had to take a screen recording
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As a clinician, I've seen young patients die of sepsis from atypical organisms with lymphopoenia weeks after acute COVID. I've seen deaths from TB and endocarditis. I've treated multidermatomal shingles. I routinely look out for post-COVID lymphopoenia 🧵
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I just realized there’s a new(?) feature in iOS where, if you long press on the subject of a photograph in your camera roll, it automatically masks that part of the photo and you can paste the subject into other places??
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Photograph of my head from the previous image, automatically cut out by the new iOS feature
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I just realized there’s a new(?) feature in iOS where, if you long press on the subject of a photograph in your camera roll, it automatically masks that part of the photo and you can paste the subject into other places??
Photograph of my head against a blue background
Photograph of my head from the previous image, automatically cut out by the new iOS feature
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For instance..these are Black history museums, supported by community, in Florida right now. They will be even more important as time goes on. Supporting them is a good way to not get into "all is lost" mentality
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Florida has now effectively banned all books in classrooms that aren't textbooks. Teachers cannot keep their own classroom libraries, otherwise they face criminal prosecution. This is what President DeSantis will bring to the rest of the US.
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Yet not all journalists have departed from the fourth estate’s aspiration to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Some have centered and humanized those most impacted and offered a vision for a better “new normal.” 9/
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I’d love it if these pieces change minds; the odds feel low sometimes but the possibility exists, and we should shoot for it. But even if that doesn’t happen, we can still fulfil the incredibly important goal of making marginalized people feel seen and heard. 2/
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As we suggest, cultural and political institutions are joining media in a broader “war on empathy”—evident, for example, in Biden’s recent statement that he “stopped thinking about” pandemic casualties. 8/
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BIDEN: “And I think we — I sometimes underestimate it because I stopped thinking about it, but I’m sure you don’t: We lost 1 — over 1 million people in several years to COVID.” We lost almost 700,000 people to covid since Biden took office two years ago. whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/
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“The need for — I mean, look at what’s happened. And I think we — I sometimes underestimate it because I stopped thinking about it, but I’m sure you don’t: We lost 1 — over 1 million people in several years to COVID.

What that means is — and the study was done that there are eight people close to every one of those — on average — those 1 million people. How many mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncle, aunts, got up in the morning or sat down for dinner at night and there was an empty chair? How many? And what impact does that have on the rest of the family?”
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In suggesting that well-to-do “liberals” are the vanguard of COVID mitigations, these stories are also wrong on the facts. Support for a more vigorous policy response has consistently concentrated among the groups that are most impacted and that remain at greatest risk. 5/
Left side is a screenshot of The Atlantic story entitled “The Liberals Who Can’t Quite Lockdown.” Right side is a Kaiser Family Foundation bar graph of concern among adults about their risk of getting seriously sick from COVID and an increase in COVID cases and hospitalizations this fall. This bar graph shows that concern is higher among older adults and Black and Hispanic adults.
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Recent essays in legacy media outlets have depicted individuals advocating for stronger COVID policies as unsympathetic “holdouts” on the fringes of society. Our piece suggests the myriad costs of irresponsible coverage of COVID & public health advocates. 2/
Image of New Yorker story “The Case for Wearing Masks Forever.”
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